David Ward - Landscape Photography - Into The Light

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Oscar Wilde

Mystery is a rich seam of opportunity for the photographer. How you mine it will depend upon your individual approach to photography. I’m not advocating mystification or deliberate obfuscation in order to suggest some spurious “deeper” meaning. I propose the inclusion of four different mysteries in order to add depth, texture and nuance to photographic images, to go beyond the mere clinical recording of a scene which the photographic process seems to invite:

Scale

When the scale of an image is indeterminate our imagination can be let loose. This type of image is always a portion of a landscape rather than a wider view since scale can easily be determined within a vista. Typically they are also abstract in nature or, one might say, they are abstractions of natural forms.

Spatial ambiguity

Spatially ambiguous images are akin to optical illusions. There may be an uncertain scale but it is the suggestion of something other than what was photographed, perhaps the impression of a face or the outline of a torso, that makes them different.

In the realm of perceptual psychology an ambiguous image is one where our interpretation flips from one state to another and we can’t hold both images in our mind at once. Ambiguous photographs of the natural world are not so clear-cut. They suggest something other than what has been recorded but still retain the meaning of the original scene.

Lighting

Something half glimpsed in the shadows can often stay in our minds longer than an image fixed in our minds in the cold, clear light of day – developing in the imagination to achieve a significance it may not actually deserve.

Incongruity

An image containing incongruity is quite simply one that prompts us to ask questions such as: “How did that goat get up the tree?” or “What are those men doing with a canoe on a glacier?” The more perceptive amongst you will have noticed that neither of my examples specifically relate to expressive landscape photography. In what we might call “pure” landscape such incongruities often point at manipulation (either during or after the making of the image) since true incongruities in the landscape are either very rare or their significance arcane.

Often these visual mysteries are present in a finished image but by accident rather than by design. I deliberately seek to include these different mysteries in a photograph in order to increase its depth of meaning.